Michael Deacon watches the final Top Gear of the series, as Clarkson,
May and Hammond complete their African adventure.

It’s often said that you can enjoy Top Gear even if you don’t like cars. I’d go further than that.

I’d say you can enjoy Top Gear even if you don’t like Top Gear.

Because if you’re the sort of person who groans at the thudding sarcasm, the crowing schadenfreude, the scuffling playground competitiveness, you can still pass a perfectly pleasurable hour counting the number of times Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May sound unwittingly like Alan Partridge.

“Because the Subaru is the best. FACT.” (All right, that one’s a bit more Brent than Partridge, but near enough.)

Even the most committed of Top Gear’s detractors, though, would have been hard-pushed not to enjoy this episode, the last in the current series and the concluding part of the three Alans’ journey down Africa to locate the source of the Nile.

From start to finish it was a triumph of honking puerility, exemplified best by their repeated pillaging of each other’s cars. (Clarkson had Hammond’s windscreen; Hammond had Clarkson’s toilet, which he’d attached where his bonnet had been before May had stolen it).

But it was also, in places, engagingly inventive. They crossed a crocodile-infested stretch of river using only a raft and some rope.

And the end of the quest, when they staggered wheezing from their cars to race each other on foot to the Nile’s source, was weirdly gripping. (May won.)